Artist description Budget Productions is proud to present the first in an occasional series of milestones from the history of music. The aim of the series is to present to a new generation of music lovers forgotten musical geniuses of the past century; forgotten, sadly, but whose musical innovation has insidiously seeped into today's musical mainstream.

Music Style "…an amusing collage of musical doodles and clichés and surrealist comment on the performance situation"

Musical Influences PEGRE influenced many.

Similar Artists Others sound like PEGRE.

Artist History These long lost recordings came to light only recently among a pile of moldy cassettes, period newspaper clippings and assorted pornography that were part of an auction job lot in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. The provenance is presumed to be the late King Faisal of Egypt; although this is unproved, given that larger-than-life figure's penchant for the exotic and eclectic, the claims could well be true. Carefully restored using the very latest that modern audio technology has to offer, the music suffers only slightly from the recording and reproduction technology of the day, although, in some cases, parts of some songs are missing; presumably tragically and irrevocably lost to posterity. What is presented here is a selection of compositions of both studio and live performances from a collective of musical anarchists who performed under a variety of guises, including Budget Jazz, The Shivering Semiquavers Septet and this one, the Pink Elephants and Green Rats Ensemble.The music itself defies description although that did not stop some puzzled music critics of the period from trying, as this quote from the now defunct Natal Mercury shows: "…an amusing collage of musical doodles and clichés and surrealist comment on the performance situation." Perhaps. What is clear however, is the enormous impact and influence PEGRE had on the direction that music subsequently took, as will immediately be apparent, for example, from listening to Man-Eating Sharks to anyone with even a passing knowledge of a certain American band whose 15 seconds of fame occurred in the latter half of the Twentieth Century.

Group Members Little is known of the band members themselves. It is known, however, that they were active in South Africa sometime in the last century, that members were of varying nationalities and musical backgrounds and that they delighted in satirical and deliberately crude and approximate renditions of often impossible compositions. So much was this latter point a feature of PEGRE's musical aesthetic that it spawned a whole new musical genre - "Rough Music" - which has had several imitators (most notably The Rolling Stones - a pale imitation of PEGRE) but in which they remain unrivalled, if unknown, even to this day.

Instruments various

Press Reviews "…an amusing collage of musical doodles and clichés and surrealist comment on the performance situation."

Location Manchester, Greater Manchester - United Kingdom

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